Edited Production Notes
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Richard Linklater as a Filmmaker Edited production notes Richard Linklater – The director and the film RICHARD LINKLATER (Director/Producer) was born in Houston, Texas, and attended Sam Houston State University, before leaving to work on offshore oilrigs in the Gulf of Mexico. Moving to Austin, he founded the Austin Film Society in 1985, to showcase films from around the world that were not typically shown in the city. He began work on his debut film as writer/director, 1988s ‘It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books’ and, three years later, he wrote, produced and directed ‘Slacker’, which became an indie sensation in the early 1990s. Despite its minuscule budget, the movie became the subject of considerable mainstream media attention, with the term ‘slacker’ becoming a much-overused catchall epithet for America's disaffected youth. In 1993, he wrote and directed Dazed and Confused, another influential and popular coming-of-age comedy. Next, Linklater made Before Sunrise, a romance set in Vienna, starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. Nine years later, he, Hawke and Delpy received Oscar® nominations for their screenplay of Before Sunset which continued the lovers’ story in Paris. His eclectic canon continued with SubUrbia, based on the Eric Bogosian play; The Newton Boys, a 1920s-set historical crime drama; Waking Life, an animated feature based on live-action; Tape, based on Stephen Belber’s three-character one-act play; the short film Live From Shiva’s Dance Floor, featuring ‘Speed’ Levitch; the international comedy hit School of Rock, starring Jack Black; $5.15/Hr., an ensemble comedy about restaurant workers; Bad News Bears, a remake of the hit baseball comedy; Fast Food Nation, a searching dramatic examination of the burger business; Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, an animated futuristic thriller starring Keanu Reeves and, most recently, Inning by Inning: A Portrait of a Coach, a documentary about University of Texas baseball coach Augie Garrido. Linklater continues to serve as the artistic director for the Austin Film Society, which has given out almost $1,000,000 in grants to Texas filmmakers and in 1999, received the first National Honoree Award from the Directors Guild of America in recognition of its support of the arts. As an independent feature, Me and Orson Welles needed to make creative use of every penny of its limited budget and found a solution in basing the production in London, where a combination of Pinewood Studios and some imaginatively chosen locations brought New York to life. And thanks to some visual trickery, the imposing scale and distinctive architecture of the bustling city has been vibrantly recreated on a comparative shoestring. ‘This movie doesn’t really exist any longer in New York,’ says Richard Linklater. ‘If you go to where the Mercury Theatre was, you would never know. It’s an office building – there’s not even a plaque. That street looks so different; it didn’t really matter to me where we shot the film. As a filmmaker, wherever I could make this film I would, (and I did)’. ‘It’s been wonderful working with production designer Laurence Dorman,’ continues Linklater. ‘We went over to New York together – he wasn’t that familiar with the city, so we went to a lot of the actual addresses in the movie and I showed him around.’ www.filmeducation.org/meandorsonwelles www.meandorsonwellesthemovie.com ©2009 CinemaNX. All Rights Reserved. ©2009 Film Education 1 Film Education is not responsible for the content of external sites. Dorman’s visit inspired his design of the street set on Pinewood’s Orchard Lot: ‘It was worth every second actually, because we were able to visit the site of the theatre and I was able to get the geography of 41st Street into my mind, with Bryant Park and all the things that are mentioned in the script. And even though 41st Street was completely different to how it would have been in those days, I was able to just wander around the neighbourhood and take pictures all over midtown and all the way down to 22nd Street. I was picking out all of the old stuff, the architecture that I imagined would have been there at the time and turning it into our little composite street. I’ve taken a selection of buildings based on my photographs and put them together to suit my purposes. For the exterior of the Mercury Theatre we found a single photograph taken in the early 1900s when the building, then the Comedy Theatre, was putting on its first production. We took a little bit of licence here and there, but it’s great to see that original picture and then to be able to look at our street – it’s quite thrilling to do something like that.’ The theatre Crucial to the success of the enterprise was finding a theatre that could play the interior of the Mercury itself. By a stroke of good fortune CinemaNX, the production company, is based in the Isle of Man and there in the capital, Douglas, is the magnificently restored Gaiety Theatre, an almost exact contemporary of the Mercury. ‘I don’t think we would have been able to make the film if we hadn’t been able to shoot it there,’ says the producer, Marc Samuelson. ‘It was just the most fantastic set for us. It worked really well, looked great in the film, was just the right size – in every way it fitted the bill.’ The theatre opened originally as a large pavilion in 1893 and following a redesign by Frank Matcham, it re-opened as an opera house and theatre in 1900. After early success, years of neglect began to take their toll and the building was acquired by the Isle of Man Government in 1971. A comprehensive programme of restoration was launched in 1990 and completed in 2000. One of the last elements to be restored was the famous Corsican Trap, the only known original version of this classic stage effect. ‘I really fell in love with the place,’ admits Linklater. ‘It was almost too nice, too ornate, but I thought if we brought it down a little bit and didn’t look up at the beautiful domed cathedral- like ceiling, it had similar proportions to the Mercury Theatre in seats and size. The stage was about the same size and the below stage area and its trap door arrangement with locks and pulleys was far more complex and interesting than you would ever be able to realise if you were building your own stage. So all of that felt great, and to shoot on the Isle of Man for those weeks was just kind of perfect. Some films are just meant to be. It just feels like it lines up and it’s meant to happen.’ www.filmeducation.org/meandorsonwelles www.meandorsonwellesthemovie.com ©2009 CinemaNX. All Rights Reserved. ©2009 Film Education 2 Film Education is not responsible for the content of external sites. The book Robert Kaplow, on whose novel the film is based, was eager to see Welles' production of Caesar for the first time on the screen. He remembers the origins of the story: ‘I was sitting in the basement of the Rutgers University Library, looking through a copy of 'Theatre Arts Monthly' from 1937, and there was a photograph from Welles' production of Julius Caesar which featured Welles in a dark coat and black gloves, sitting at the edge of the stage. Next to him was a young man playing a ukulele tricked up to look like a lute. My first thought was: the real story here is the kid. What does this moment feel like from the kid's point of view – to bear witness to a celebrity creating himself right in front of your eyes? Investigating the history of this theatrical moment, I discovered the young actor from 1937, Arthur Anderson, was alive and living in New York. He was an invaluable source, and he still has the ukulele, which he played for me at his kitchen table in a remarkable moment that felt as if I were melting through time. Linklater's film astonishingly recreates this photograph with heart-stopping accuracy.’ The design A key element in the recreation of the period was the skill and experience of the Oscar- nominated cinematographer Richard Pope. ‘I had a great meeting with Dick,’ remembers Linklater, ‘and I just saw him as a kindred spirit. He had that wild attitude – he seemed like a kind of mad scientist. And what you want in that position is enthusiasm – and skill, obviously, that goes without saying. Other than that, it’s a personality match. He seems in the spirit of the film and he said he fell in love with it when he read the passage in the script where one of the actresses, Muriel Brassler, played by Kelly Reilly, is talking about lighting and gels and about getting a little butterfly shadow under her nose. He just thought that was so amusing. With most films, even a stylised period piece, you bend a little towards naturalism. But when you are recreating the exact lighting of this highly dramatic, very theatrical stage show, it’s just fun. It was like shooting an old studio film with high contrast lighting and it’s probably the only time I will ever get to do that. The story goes that the great cinematographer Gregg Toland saw this production of Julius Caesar and when he heard that Welles was going to Hollywood to make Citizen Kane he told him he wanted to work with him because of the lighting he had done for the play.’ To establish the look of the Mercury Theatre, costume designer Nic Ede researched the fascist imagery of the original Caesar production.